Mikhail A. Vasenkov

Mikhail Anatolyevich Vasenkov (1944-) was a Russian-Peruvian spy who was arrested in the United States in 2010 for his role in the "Illegals Program" sleeper cell operation.

Biography
Mikhail Anatolyevich Vasenkov was born in the Russian SFSR of the Soviet Union in 1944, and he became a Soviet KGB agent. On 13 March 1976, he flew from Madrid, Spain to Lima, Peru, using the passport of a deceased three-year-old Uruguayan boy. He worked as a television reporter in Peru (becoming a citizen in 1979), and he criticized US policy in Latin America and supported liberation movements in those countries. In 1983, he married Vicky Pelaez, and the two of them moved to New York in 1985, settling in Yonkers. Vasenkov became a journalist and anthropologist, and he spoke glowingly of the Shining Path guerrilla movement in a 1990 article for a European publication. From 2008 to 2009, he was an adjunct professor at Baruch College, maintaining that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were money-making ploys for the US government. He praised President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and disparaged Colombian president Alvaro Uribe as a pawn for right-wing paramilitary groups, and he was let go at the end of the semester after a student complained; his instruction was not up to standard. At some point, Vasenkov became an SVR agent, taking part in the "Illegals Program" sleeper cell operation. On 27 June 2010, he confessed to being a Russian spy and revealed his true identity, and he was deported to Russia.